Ain’t Technology Wunnerful?

As I mentioned yesterday, tomorrow night is the “really big shoe” celebrating Nude Hippo’s 15th anniversary. You can check it out at 9 pm on the NBC Chicago Nonstop channel (Comcast 341, RCN 50, WOW! 130 and DTV 5.2). There’s already a fun trailer on line, featuring the lovely Amy Zanglin, at Nude Hippo dot com. Some people who won’t be watching are the nice people who claim that Earth is being invaded by Dorito shaped UFOs. Most of hem are stunned that objects, which look exactly like military grade flying wing aircraft, can move so slow and be so big. They are amazed because they are too stupid to understand the meaning of the word “perspective.” Big things that are far away appear to be moving slowly. Thus has it ever been. Now, please make these people go away. Maybe to France. Yeah that would work. You see, in France, it is perfectly legal to marry dead people. And if these tools only married dead people we wouldn’t have to worry about them procreating.

Speaking of not procreating, actually this is a happy story, girls in Hamtramk Michigan, the city made famous by Terminal White, realized that many young ladies are denied the joys of prom due to their religious beliefs. So, they set up a girl’s only prom and sold that sucker right out.

The prom countdown was nearly complete, the do-it-yourself Greek columns, pink and white tulle bows and plastic flutes with the “Once Upon a Dream” logo awaiting the evening of evenings.

But as she looked at her reflection in the mirror, her one-shoulder lavender gown matching the elaborate hijab that framed her face in a cascade of flowers — a style learned on YouTube — Tharima Ahmed knew that what lay ahead was more than simply a prom.

As organizer of Hamtramck High School’s first all-girl prom, which conforms to religious beliefs forbidding dating, dancing with boys or appearing without a head scarf in front of males, Tharima, 17, was forging a new rite of passage for every teenage Muslim girl who had ever spent prom night at home, wistfully watching the limousines roll by.

“Hi, guys — I mean girls!” Tharima, a Bangladeshi-American, exuded into the microphone as 100 girls — Yemeni-American, Polish-American, Palestinian-American, Bosnian-American and African-American — began pouring into the hall on Bangladesh Avenue.

This was prom, Hamtramck-style: the dense, scrappy working-class city of 22,500 encircled by Detroit, once predominantly German and Polish, has become one of the most diverse small cities in America. Its new soul lay in the music playlist embedded in Rukeih Malik’s iPhone: Lady Gaga, Cobra Starship, the Belgrade-born singer Ana Kokic and The Bilz, a Canadian-South Asian band, singing “2 Step Bhangra.”

In this season of wobbly heels and cleavage, the bittersweet transformation of teenagers in jeans and T-shirts into elegant adults barely recognizable to their friends is an anticipated tradition.

But at the all-girl prom, there were double double-takes, as some of Tharima’s classmates, normally concealed in a chrysalis of hijab and abaya, the traditional Muslim cloak, literally let their hair down in public for the first time.

Eman Ashabi, a Yemeni-American who helped organize the event, arrived in a ruffled pink gown, her black hair falling in perfect waves, thanks to a curling iron. Like many here, she stunned her friends.

Good for them. Prom is supposed to be many positive things, despite the upper class’ tendency to ruin it. These young ladies had fun in a safe environment and got to share private moments with close friends. That makes them more mature than any of us.

It also means that they will never find out that Mexican scientists have figured out how to turn Tequila into diamonds. As one scientist noted, “All that’s required is to heat the liquor to 1500 °F, throw in a few fancy physics tricks, and – voilà – you end up with shimmering sheets of the gem.” Seems like a waste of good booze to me, but what do I know?

Speaking of beneficial science, Jolene Van Vugt, a name that will live forever, recently set the land speed record for a racing toilet.

Most speed records that involve the toilet are set by people who have to run to one, but one Canadian stuntwoman made history by riding one.

She’s Jolene Van Vugt, 31, and she’s flushed with excitement after riding a motorized toilet into the Guinness World Record book on Wednesday at a speed of 46 mph.

“I flew into Australia yesterday and came out here to jump straight on the toilet,” she told the BBC. “That was so fun and I’m stoked to get the record.”

In the process, she beat the previous record speed of 42 mph, set March 10, 2011, by Edd China in Milan, Italy.

It wasn’t easy. To win the record, she had to drive the craptastic contraption — which, according to National Post, was basically a go-kart with porcelain toilet in place of a driver’s seat — 330 feet in both directions. Early on, her chain kept falling off, but finally got repaired.

At one point, the whole attempt was almost dumped because Van Vugt couldn’t stop wobbling all over the place on the bumpy track.

“The cobblestones were a bit dangerous and proved problematic for me,” she told the Telegraph. “The kick off them almost threw me.”

World records are nothing new to Van Vugt, whose previous Guinness records include being the first female to backflip a dirt bike, performing the longest backflip and backflipping a dirtbike over Arizona’s Grand Canyon,according to Sky News.

Still, when all is said and done, she keeps thinking about the toilet.

“I’ve broken Guiness World Records before but I never thought I’d be the fastest toilet rider in the world,” she told the Sydney Morning Herald.

Her mom is weeping in joy right now.

No word on whether she was exposed to the bio-weapon that temporarily turns people into raging homosexuals. Also no word on who the hell thought such a weapon was a good idea.

But, enough of this same sex stuff, no matter how benign, it’s time to go to Spain and meet busloads of women who want tot do nothing more than cook, clean and pop out babies.

Country boy, meet city girl.

Inspired by a Hollywood western, a Spanish dating association is trying to slow a population drain from the country’s beleaguered central villages, introducing bachelors to women bussed in from the big city of Madrid with hopes of ending a bride shortage.

Candeleda, a town of 6,000 on the banks of the picturesque Lobera River, hosted a weekend fiesta to welcome 68 women for a meet-and-greet with the village’s single men. Ancient cave paintings show Candeleda has been inhabited for some 5,000 years, and resident Jose Miguel, 67, said he would hate to see its population dwindle after such a long history.
“I’ve checked out the few widows and single women here,” said Miguel. “I signed up for this to meet new ladies and to hopefully show them the beauty of my town.”

The group, Asocamu, was set up in 1995 to promote rural re-population by organizing parties for single men and woman, but Spain’s painful financial crisis and the lure of city jobs has made the need more pressing than ever, Manuel Gozalo, one of the organizers, said Sunday.

Many villages are falling into ruin, with national statistics showing that of Spain’s 5,000 villages up to 100 are under imminent threat of abandonment.

Large swathes of central and northern Spain are at risk of depopulation. In the small agricultural communities of Spain’s central plain single, male residents were finding the loneliness too tough to endure, Gozalo said.

Asocamu credits as its inspiration the 1951 film “Westward the Women,” starring Robert Taylor and Denise Darcel, which tells the story of how the American west was populated by organizing wagon trains of women to provide company, and brides, for lonely pioneers.

In the red-roofed village of Candeleda, men and women danced, flirted — and considered their prospects. Blanca Fernandez, 52, works in sales in Madrid and was attracted by the idea of a nice day out and a chance for romance.

“I know it’s difficult to find the love of one’s life, but some of these meetings have led to marriages,” she said.

And it’s not just the lure of jobs and clean apartments that is drawing people away, there is also the promise of limitless sexbots. Scientists Michelle Mars & Ian Yeoman are promising a world of guilt free nooky in the near future.

Human prostitutes could be a thing of the past by 2050, as more and more robots get pimped into prostitution.

That’s the future envisioned by Michelle Mars and Ian Yeoman at Victoria University of Wellington, who have released a report suggesting that lifelike robots will be coming to a brothel near you.

Mars and Yeoman see lots of advantages to having “hoe-bots” doing the dirty work instead of humans, such as “commercial sex robots would be free of disease and would reduce the trafficking of real people,” they told The Week.

Despite the fact that these hard-wired whores will suck up electricity as opposed to, er, never mind, the raunchy robot researchers say the idea isn’t that shocking.

“Sex robots are absolutely inevitable. In fact, they already exist,” Mars told Business Insider. “Society has had relationships with machines and we continue to have increasingly intimate relationships with more and more sophisticated technologies.”

For instance, there is “Roxxxy,” an interactive doll costing between $7,000 to $9,000 that was unveiled at an adult entertainment expo in 2010, and, according to MSNBC.com, can be programmed with different personalities such as frigid Farrah and wild Wendy.

If you’re the type of person who can’t get used to the idea of getting kinky with an android, don’t worry: There will still be human sex workers as well.

“Human prostitution will still be around. It’s the oldest profession and won’t be thwarted by robot alternatives,” Mars told MSNBC.com. “It’s just that high-quality alternatives where the robots are indistinguishable from humans will cut down the profitability of human exploitation.”

However, some tech writers such as Lauren Davis believes there are some questions that need to be answered before “ho-bots” become as common as smartphones.

“Would sex robots … diminish the demand for human sex tourism enough to negatively impact the economies of certain regions? Or would human sex tourism in those regions explode as robotic prostitutes came to displace human ones in places that could afford the robots?” she wrote on iOP.com. “If human sex tourism did somehow become an economic impossibility, how might the economies of those regions shift and change?”

Christian Bryant of Mashable.com also sees some potential downsides, such as weird R2D2 noises during sex and waiting for software updates and one definite upside.

“Technically, this won’t be cheating, right?” he asked.

Oh no, there isn’t a woman in the world who would get upset with her husband or boyfriend banging a piece of moaning plastic instead of her. I’m sure this will all go well.

Oh, and just in case you’re curious, the rise of sex bots will finally end Genghis Khan’s rule of the world. It seems that 16,000,000 men are directly descended from him. Or, to be more accurate, odds are that you, or someone you know, is directly related to him. When the sex bots take over that gene pool thing should get mighty shallow and put a stop to that kind of prolific nonsense.